A scholar and humanist, Edward Said is the controversial voice of Palestine in America and an eloquent mediator between the Middle East and the West

Huge as American academe is, it has few public intellectuals -- men or women ( whose views carry weight with general readers off-campus. Near the top of any list of such people is a tall, elegantly tailored, 57-year-old American of Palestinian descent who for the past 30 years has taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City: Edward Said.

Said (pronounced Sigh-eed) owes his fame partly to his cultural criticism, notably his 1978 book Orientalism, a study of how ideas and images about the Arab world were contrived by Western writers and why. Now comes Culture and...